A Bad Bet
by We Get On
Summary: She possesses the most uncanny and frightening ability to tear him down and build him anew in the next moment. Grimsley/Caitlin, hints of past Darach/Caitlin. Rated M for sexual content.


She possesses the most uncanny and frightening ability to tear him down and build him anew in the next moment.

Grimsley is aware that an outsider could easily interpret such an ability as love, at least on his side, but he doesn't like to think in those terms, because such a love would be unrequited at best. He eschews the concept just as Caitlin does, tells himself that love makes a person foolish and he's already foolish enough without it, though perhaps with more difficulty than she.

It's not easy for him to say with certainty just how much care she has to put into ensuring she does not love, however, for sometimes she, still glowing after a night together, will confess to every once in awhile thinking fleeting thoughts about having something _more_.

In the same breath, then, she'll tell him with all the casualty in the world that she could never publicly see someone who amounts to little more than a ruined name; that she considers every once in awhile returning to her valet in Sinnoh, for a valet is admittedly superior to a gambler; that she's loved before.

While each of these facts makes his stomach twist and his head murky, it's that there have been other men that he dislikes most. Caitlin – _his_ Caitlin, he has the folly of thinking sometimes – is a creature of innocence and grace, and to hear and see otherwise is heresy.

Grimsley likes to overlook how strikingly hypocritical such a sentiment is; who is he to grieve at her, from what he has gathered, premature loss of innocence when the only thing binding the pair together are the nights they spend in his bed? It's different, of course – it's because he genuinely cares, while the others didn't.

In any case, it's her ability to convince Grimsley that he does have a hope with her and then rip any of that positive emotion away, to make him feel something beyond the superficiality that has marred his sexual acquaintances in the past and then numb him with only a word or two, and to make him regret he ever met her but feel overwhelmed with the notion that he could never really leave Caitlin within the span of moments that defines whatever it is that they have.

If that was all they had to hold onto, however, he might have found a way to slip through her fingers by now.

It's _this_ that keeps him from bowing out – Grimsley knows that he has an addictive personality, but he tells himself that any sane man would succumb just the same.

'_This_' being her body pressed firmly against his chest while her lips touch his so lightly that he wouldn't be surprised to hear he was imagining the kiss (the pair found long ago that the leather couch in Grimsley's chamber works well when neither wants to bother with the worry that someone might see one of them coming and going from their apartments), while he leans forward so their foreheads touch. It's not necessarily the act so much as what he finds that they can communicate through the act that appeals so greatly to him, however.

It's the way she grinds her hips against his with just enough desperation that tells Grimsley that she, too, has invested _some_ kind of emotion into whatever this is (that she wants him just as much as he wants her), though she has too much dumb pride to admit to such a silly thing. As inevitable as they see the end of their affair being (if Grimsley's learned anything over the years, it's that the house always wins), there's a certain sense of reassurance, knowing that they both have something to lose; that someday, it's a loss they'll share together.

It's how he'll stubbornly keep a hand on her thigh at times for no other reason than to make sure _she _won't slip through his fingers, and how if he allows his hand to fall onto the leather next to her, she'll make a point to take his hand in her own and move it back, as if she feels the same.

It's the thought that sometimes crosses Grimsley's mind as he presses into her that if they could stay like this forever, as one, his family's name and his vices wouldn't really matter so much, and that once or twice he catches a look glinting in her eyes that makes him wonder if perhaps the same thought is crossing her mind.

It's how, as he feels pressure mounting, he'll sometimes whisper "stay with me" hot in her ear, and the subsequent eagerness in her tone as she tells him yes, yes, of course she'll stay with him, that makes him doubt whether the words were said simply in a bout of passion.

It's the passion with which she screams his name during climax, like it's the only word she knows, that makes him feel momentarily as if he is the first and only man in her life, and even if he isn't, such a fact is trivial, because all that exists in that moment is the present. To hell with the rest!

It's the manner in which she doesn't pull away when he holds her afterword, the way she fights to stay awake despite looking terribly sleepy so she can speak to him for just a few minutes more, even if it is just pillow talk, how she makes sure to thread her fingers through his before she finally dozes off, that lets him know that she's not made of ice – and if she is, she's at least warming up.

It's not love, of course. Love, as they both know, is a bad bet.

(But Grimsley's always been an awful gambler.)


End file.
